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I gave into the temptation to weigh myself this morning because the mirror was telling me good things.

Weight check- 212.7

This is FANTASTIC news. I splurged my ass off Saturday with probably 3500+ calories and at least 400g of carbs, yet only a few days later I'm at the lowest weight I've been without being dehydrated (I reached 211 last week, but was desperately dehydrated at the time. I'm thoroughly hydrated now. learned my lesson, hopefully.). it just goes to show you that sometimes you just gotta say screw it and have what you want. I've got 2 more days before my "official" weigh in saturday morning, and hopefully I'll be able to get below 212, but eitehr way I'm happy.

I just got in a quick upper body session in the gym at work. This one was tough because last night we had to take my daughter to the emergency room. Unfortunately my wife misread the label and gave her too much cough syrup. Luckily it's a homeopathic mixture, so everybody is perfectly fine, but I ended up only getting a few hours of sleep. Not good for someone who relies on their 7+ hours a night!

Standing press-
45x15
45x5
95x8
100x8
100x8
100x8
100x8
100x8

BOR-
100x15
140x8
140x8
140x8
140x8
140x8

You'll notice that I skipped my heavier sets and just got in my volume work. Towards the end I kept yawning even though I was working hard enough to break a sweat. My legs felt terrible during the standing press after doing squats yesterday and not getting much sleep, but I push the weights as fast and possible and tried to get something out of it.

Anyways, I got the work done and sometimes that has to be enough.

Intermittent fasting has been going well. I've been using BTB's method of getting some protein in during the day. That keeps me from going catabolic (at least as much as possible) and keeps me somewhat satisfied too. The best part is DINNER. I usually have 1200+ calories left to eat at the end of the day, and to be honest I often end up well below my 2k calorie goal, which is fine when you also have days of higher intake to even everything out and keep the weekly deficit from getting too high.

I gave into the temptation to weigh myself this morning because the mirror was telling me good things.

Weight check- 212.7

This is FANTASTIC news. I splurged my ass off Saturday with probably 3500+ calories and at least 400g of carbs, yet only a few days later I'm at the lowest weight I've been without being dehydrated (I reached 211 last week, but was desperately dehydrated at the time. I'm thoroughly hydrated now. learned my lesson, hopefully.). it just goes to show you that sometimes you just gotta say screw it and have what you want. I've got 2 more days before my "official" weigh in saturday morning, and hopefully I'll be able to get below 212, but eitehr way I'm happy.

Losing consistently each day, looking pretty good in the mirror, and feeling great! Energy hasn't been awesome, but that's just the way it is when I get up so early each day.

Training is going on the backburner for a few weeks as we transition into our new house. I'm also going to be installing laminate flooring in the living room which is going to take up a chunk of time. I should still be able to get some sessions in during the week. No worries, gotta do what I gotta do.

I'm going to get below 210 next week. The progress has become pretty slow, but there's still progress there and that's what matters. I've also managed to develop some pretty solid strength while also losing fat, and that's awesome.

I wasn't planning to train this weekend, but I got lucky and had some time this afternoon to get a squat session in. I decided to do something a little different, and it was pretty fun.

Deep CAT Squats-
45x5
135x4
185x4
225x4
275x3

Squat-
315x5 Weight class PR

After that PR I was flying high, so I decided to try some rest pause variations. I loaded 275 on the bar, dropped down for a squat, then after the initial rebound from the bottom I pushed up about 1ft then dropped down again, pushed up again, then on the 3rd bounce I completed the lift. After each of these reps I racked the bar, waited for about 30 seconds, then did the whole thing again. I ended up doing 5 of these squat variations.

Part of the reason I felt so good in the gym today is that I didn't eat any carbs this morning, then right before training I had some cool whip mixed with greek yogurt mixed with whey protein, which is basically the best preworkout meal ever created. I combined that with a caffeine pill, then by the time I was warmed up I was ready and raring to move some iron.

This dietary method of focusing all carbs right around training is going to be my main method once I start my slow bulk after the new year (and after hopefully attaining shredded status).

After this I did some cable upright rows, cable crossovers, rope triceps pulldowns, shrugs, then finally extended ROM pushups with my hands on blocks to finish myself off. It was nice to get a pump through my upper body. Very different from what I've been doing. Tomorrow I'll do a pull day.

Diet is going well. I had an extremely low intake day yesterday to get me back on track after a weekend on maintenance, then today was low carb with a normal cutting intake. Tomorrow...who knows? I'll figure it out when I get there.

Really close now to getting below 210. I've got another appointment with the podiatrist to see if there's anything else at all that they can do about my foot pain. I know I haven't mentioned it much, but the steroid shots didn't work, and once again I'm left without the ability to run or do any exercise that involves pushing off of my right heal, which SUCKS. Hill sprints, sled pulls, anything I might want to do for conditioning leaves me with intense pain in my foot. Thank god it doesn't effect my squats!

Diet is going well. I'm settling into a weekly routine that looks like this; Saturday and Sunday I eat maintenance calories, which usually results in .2 or .3lb of weight gain from fluid. On Monday I go super low on calories and avoid carbs to both take advantage of my metabolism and restart my weight loss. Then for a couple days a cycle carbs and stay just under 2k calories, usually having 1 more very low intake day before the weekend comes again.

At this point I'm only losing about 1.5lb a week. I could lose more, but I'm getting leaner and am more concerned now about muscle and strength loss. This means I may not reach my goals by Christmas, but as far as I'm concerned I'm still carrying more fat than I'm going to have again for a long time, so it's worth it to take my time and do it healthy. At 1.5lb lost a week it will still take more than 13 weeks to reach my goal of 190, and that's assuming that my loss will stay at this rate, which is a bad assumption to make because I know for a fact that my weight loss will slow as I get down closer to 10% bodyfat.

But I feel GREAT when I look in the mirror. Upper abs are starting to come in, and under the fat and loose skin I can feel a great set of abs just begging to be shown to the world for the first time.

This is going to be even tougher now that I can't integrate cardio, but I need to keep working hard and burning as many calories as possible so I don't have to cut my intake too low.

Upper body pull today. I kept it simple with pull downs and machine rows. I wanted to do some pullups instead of pull downs, but the only pullup bars in the gym have a grip on them that twists as you hold on, which makes them awesome for developing your grip but completely useless for actually hitting your back.

After hitting the 2 back movements hard I did a couple quick sets of curls and called it a day.